Averil Dean - The Undoing

But even at this distance, the smoke was acrid and sharp in his lungs. People didn’t burn to death quietly; they went screaming and flailing.

He thought of Rory and Eric, who had died here with Celia. Their faces had dissolved in his memory, features interchanging in his mind’s eye. He’d almost forgotten now what their voices sounded like, couldn’t always be sure which conversation had taken place with Rory and which with Eric. They had become a single entity, two halves of a whole. They had lived and died and were remembered as they had lived: together.

Rory and Eric would approve of what he’d done. The Blackbird belonged to Celia. Julian was returning it to her, sending it heavenward on a cloud of billowing smoke.

It was the only apology he could think to offer.

January 11, 2009

CELIA WAS BURNING. From the minute he walked into the room and settled his gaze on her, from the first sunshiny flash of teeth in his smooth, tanned face, the squeak of floorboards under his weight, getting closer. From even before that. Years before that. This longing had simmered in her belly since childhood, when she would admire the straight line of his shoulders and the thrilling vertical channel between the muscles of his abdomen, and feel some unnamed stirring that made her long for the bright swing of his attention, as if without it she were standing underdressed in a storm. Now the fire raged between them in waves of all-consuming heat. It was him inside her, both of them in the heart of the Blackbird, a crackling hot inferno that exploded down her thighs and raced beneath her skin and tore through her throat like a flame.

In the hour before her death, Celia had never felt more alive.

* * *

If Celia ever had to explain what it was like to be living out her childhood dream, she would talk about the walls. Miles and miles of walls, the Blackbird had, and every one of them covered with wallpaper or cheap vinyl paneling, or spiderwebbed with tiny cracks, or pockmarked with holes in the plaster or the doors. Sometimes, as here in the kitchen, all of the above. She imagined the listener—a sympathetic motherly type like Mrs. Kirby at the post office—who would someday come to stay in one of the rooms they were renovating. You wouldn’t believe such a small hotel would have so many walls, Celia would say. I never thought we’d see the end of them.

Some of the rooms had been too much for her. In Two, she’d seen right away that the wallpaper was not going to budge and had papered over it with nubby grass cloth the color of summer wheat. That was Rory’s room, calmly masculine, with a punched tin lamp and curtains made from lengths of painter’s cloth, a pinstripe in chocolate brown that Celia had sewn around the edges.

“I’m still gonna throw my socks on the floor.” Rory had run his hand over the walnut dresser and the Hopi blanket across the foot of the bed.

“You can lead a boy to a hamper,” said Eric, whose room even in high school was aggressively neat, “but you can’t make him use it.”

In Eight, where Julian Moss was staying, joined some nights by Kate, Celia had started strong but been foiled halfway through. Some of the wallpaper glue had hardened over time to the color and consistency of amber, and no amount of chemicals or steam would remove it. She was forced to leave the clover-green wallpaper in ragged vertical patches, but had discovered by trial and error that she could glaze those walls with a tinted wax and leave them as they were, with the pine boards showing through the strips of paper. The effect was strangely pleasing. She hung a huge copper clock over the headboard and some unframed oils on the walls and moved on to other projects.

The kitchen, though, was special. It was Celia’s space, her private sanctuary, a big shabby square room with open shelves above and cavernous cupboards below, and for this room nothing would do but walls of robin’s egg blue. She had stripped every last shred of the wallpaper here—a tedious, finicky job that took a solid week—and now the cans of paint stood ready on the floor, the dishes and crockery shifted to the countertops in order to clear the space. Tomorrow she would open the first can of paint and roll it over the naked wall, a luxurious task she had long anticipated.

She scooped up a dollop of spackling paste and pressed it into a nail hole next to the pantry door frame, smoothing it over with the end of the putty knife. She stood back to inspect her work, pushing a strand of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand.

Miles of walls. I had help, of course. I had Rory and Eric.

Always when she thought of her stepbrother and his best friend, their names went in that order. Said quickly, the syllables blended into one word: Roreneric. You couldn’t say them the other way around. She wasn’t sure why.

Rory and Eric could do anything. Together they’d repaired the roof, sealed the windows, replaced the gutters and the faucets, refinished the floors. Huge, impossible jobs, but they tackled them together, cheerful and undaunted. Celia would hear Eric’s tuneless voice ringing through the old hotel, the beat of his music thundering from the stereo: Do ya, do ya want my love, baby, do ya do ya want my love... A crazy falsetto, cracking over the high notes, punctuated by Rory’s rumbling baritone urging him to keep his day job. Eric would laugh, cranking up the volume just to piss him off. They filled the empty rooms with the sound of power tools, hammers, the clatter of boards and nails, heavy thumps of their boots on the floor. The most beautiful sounds in the world.

Rory and Eric. Their names formed an impression in her mind that was less about the way they looked than about the way they felt, their dual presence like a pair of moons swirling elliptically around her: one near, the other far, then switching, accelerating, swinging away and moving heavily back. She felt the weight of them physically, a cosmic tug that kept her always wobbling slightly off balance.

No one who knew them casually could believe they’d be such good friends. Eric seemed like the antithesis to Rory’s golden-brown solidity. His pale skin was the canvas for a collection of tattoos, an ongoing attempt to illustrate his identity in a way that Rory had never needed to do. Eric was dark, pierced, mercurial, with an IQ approaching genius and a blatant reluctance to use it, as if he were too smart even to think up the things that would challenge him, too smart to keep his own brain ticking. He could easily have become frustrated with Rory, who had struggled for years with undiagnosed dyslexia and hadn’t read a book cover to cover in his life. But Rory was not unintelligent, and he had a commonsense canniness Eric lacked. When Eric wandered off course, Rory provided ballast.

Celia set down the spackling paste tray and made a wide stretch. A hot ache pressed at the back of her eyes. She had lain awake the night before, her thoughts all scraps and snippets: a flash of someone’s face, a fragment of conversation, memories like the pieces of several different puzzles all laid out on a table, impossible to assemble. At dawn she rose and went up the narrow back stairs, through the dollhouse door to the attic—a long, slanted room with one dingy window at either end and a century’s worth of accumulated junk, once so thick you had to turn sideways even to get through the door. Over the months they had sifted through it, had carried down pieces of furniture, paintings with cracked frames or rips in the canvas, boxes of books and musty old clothes, an enormous elk’s head mounted on a wooden plaque. Eric had hung this in the kitchen, as a joke, because Celia didn’t eat meat—which had upset her at first because she didn’t realize it was a joke and thought he meant for it to stay. But he took one look at her face and laughed, kissed her head and hauled the poor thing down to the truck with the other flea market items.